Emails can be a curse, but don’t blame them for the failings of company culture

Andre Spicer in The Guardian

If you ask anyone what the worst part of their job is, they are likely to respond with one word: email. Over the weekend, the inventor of this contemporary curse, Ray Tomlinson, died. Tomlinson came up with the idea while developing the Arpanet – the predecessor of today’s internet – in 1971. He and his colleagues were scratching their heads about what to do with their new invention, wherein one application eventually became email. “Don’t tell anyone!” he told a colleague. “This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”

How did email grow from messages between academics to a global epidemic?



Today, email is part of the fabric of our lives. A recent survey of US employees found that they spent 3.2 hours a day dealing with work emails alone. Often the first thing we do in the morning is scan through our emails. Smartphones have made matters much worse. One study that tracked the introduction of BlackBerrys a decade ago found employees would compulsively monitor the device, often waking up in the middle of the night to check emails. When the researchers asked people why they did this, they said they wanted to appear professional and didn’t want to miss anything. A decade later, we check our smartphones on average 221 times a day.

Email is a huge source of distraction at work. One study found that when people check their email, it takes them an average of 64 seconds to switch their attention back to their original task. Workers in the study were distracted this way an average of 96 times a day. This means they spent more than 100 minutes every day being distracted by emails. Another study recorded even more disturbing results. After observing employees closely over a two-week period, it found that after checking their emails, people would do on average 2.3 other tasks before getting back to the activity they were originally working on.

This distractive quality of emails is worrying. Our ability to focus on a task not only determines whether we get things done at work, but also helps to influence whether we feel good about what we do. A recent study by researchers at Harvard Business School asked hundreds of people what they did at work, and whether they felt they had a good day. They found that the days people felt good about their work were those when they had an uninterrupted block of time to make progress on a task that they saw as important. Unsurprisingly, the constant stream of emails is often the biggest interruption to this goal.


Many of the problems we blame on email are not really down to the inbox

Some people have suggested that you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by email with the help of a few small changes. A typical piece of advice is to only check your emails a few times a day and turn off notifications. Unfortunately, some studies suggest email management techniques don’t decrease stress. If you get a lot of emails, then you are likely to be stressed out by the sight of a bulging inbox no matter how you manage it.

It might be easy to think if we got rid of emails, our workplaces would be much happier. Some firms stop you logging into your emails after hours. Others have started deleting emails that are sent while someone is on holiday. Although dreams of an email-free workplace might seem appealing, the reality would be unlikely to create miracles. Many of the problems we blame on email are not really down to the inbox. They are actually the result of the increasingly fragmented, highly pressured and insecure patterns of work.
A recent study by researchers at Stanford found that people who spend more time working on emails were in fact not always more overloaded and stressed. Instead, people confused emails with other work issues. They saw email as a source of stress, but they did not consider other more important issues in their working lives, such as long hours or a stressful company culture. This had a dangerous consequence. A few “productivity hacks” were seen as magic keys to reducing overload, but the reality is that only changing wider working practices would help.

NSA spying revelations: why so many are keen to play down the debate

The mass surveillance that Edward Snowden has exposed asks questions not only of government but of telecoms companies too

• 
• • Nick Hopkins
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2 July 2013 17.51 BST

GCHQ reportedly snooped on foreign politicians attending two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA

Covering the Edward Snowden story has not been straightforward for many in the mainstream media, which is reflected in the disjointed coverage it has received in the UK so far. For the newspapers that campaigned so hard to get the communications data bill thrown out because of the implications for privacy, he should be a hero. But then the brash young American "stole" the material, came to the Guardian with it, and has ended up stranded in Russia, where he may or may not receive asylum with the help of Julian Assange. All of which makes him rather unpalatable to many in Fleet Street – and indeed the House of Commons. For many of them, the easier story to tell was the one about Snowden's girlfriend, who was left bereft in Hawaii.

This week there have been more revelations about the way the US spied on the EU, which followed the Guardian's disclosures about how the British snooped on diplomats from Turkey and South Africa, among others, at the G20 summit in London four years ago. This has caused genuine fury among those targeted, particularly the Germans and the French. But their anger has been met with shoulder-shrugging indignation from former British diplomats and security experts, who say this sort of thing happens all the time.

They would hardly say anything different. In all likelihood, they have either authorised or benefited from such covert intelligence gathering, so the lack of biting analysis was entirely predictable. For those in the media unsure how to deal with Snowden, and rather hoping the complex saga would go away, this was another easy escape route: "No story here, let's move on."

But there is a story. It gets lost, all too conveniently, in the diplomatic rows and the character-assassinations, but ultimately it is the legacy of the Snowden files. The documents have shown that intelligence agencies in the UK and the US are harvesting vast amounts of information about millions of people. This is fact, not fantasy. They are doing this right now, on a scale that could not have been envisaged five years ago, let alone when the laws covering the collection and retention of data were drafted. They are also sharing this treasure trove of intelligence with each other, and other close allies.

In the UK, the same ministers who sign off operations to spy on our allies, are also approving countless warrants to allow GCHQ to siphon off data from cables that carry internet traffic in and out of the country. Emails, conversations on Skype, the details of phone calls – they all go into the intelligence pot ready for analysis and digestion.

The methods that GCHQ has developed may be ingenious. But are they right? Do the laws really legitimise this activity? And can the handful of MPs and commissioners tasked with the scrutinising the agencies really keep on top of all this? Do they have the staff, the expertise? Those are the questions that need proper argument. The reassurances of senior cabinet ministers, such as William Hague, who is responsible for GCHQ, needed to be tested, not just repeated unchallenged.

Those who wail about the leaks affecting national security might consider the words of Bruce Schneier, a security specialist, who wrote in the New York Times: "The argument that exposing these documents helps the terrorists doesn't even pass the laugh test; there's nothing here that changes anything any potential terrorist would do or not do."

And where are the telecoms companies in all this, and the internet service providers? For now, they are still keeping quiet. But at some point they will be asked to explain to their millions of customers what they knew about this industrial-scale snooping. None of this is easy, and ministers and intelligence officials would like nothing more than to shut down the debate. The clues are in their discomfort.

A Father's email to his adult children

'I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed': retired naval officer's email to children in full

This is the full email that retired Royal Navy officer Nick Crews sent to his son and two daughters in February expressing his and his wife's disappointment in them.

Retired Royal Navy officer Nick Crews Photo: SWNS

2:31PM GMT 18 Nov 2012

Dear All Three

With last evening's crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.

It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth.

We are constantly regaled with chapter and verse of the happy, successful lives of the families of our friends and relatives and being asked of news of our own children and grandchildren. I wonder if you realise how we feel — we have nothing to say which reflects any credit on you or us. We don't ask for your sympathy or understanding — Mum and I have been used to taking our own misfortunes on the chin, and making our own effort to bash our little paths through life without being a burden to others. Having done our best — probably misguidedly — to provide for our children, we naturally hoped to see them in turn take up their own banners and provide happy and stable homes for their own children.

Fulfilling careers based on your educations would have helped — but as yet none of you is what I would confidently term properly self-supporting. Which of you, with or without a spouse, can support your families, finance your home and provide a pension for your old age? Each of you is well able to earn a comfortable living and provide for your children, yet each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents. 

So we witness the introduction to this life of six beautiful children — soon to be seven — none of whose parents have had the maturity and sound judgment to make a reasonable fist at making essential threshold decisions. None of these decisions were made with any pretence to ask for our advice.

In each case we have been expected to acquiesce with mostly hasty, but always in our view, badly judged decisions. None of you has done yourself, or given to us, the basic courtesy to ask us what we think while there was still time finally to think things through. The predictable result has been a decade of deep unhappiness over the fates of our grandchildren. If it wasn't for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one cock-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.

I can now tell you that I for one, and I sense Mum feels the same, have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children's underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a REALISTIC plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don't want to see your mother burdened any more with your miserable woes — it's not as if any of the advice she strives to give you has ever been listened to with good grace — far less acted upon. So I ask you to spare her further unhappiness. If you think I have been unfair in what I have said, by all means try to persuade me to change my mind. But you won't do it by simply whingeing and saying you don't like it. You'll have to come up with meaty reasons to demolish my points and build a case for yourself. If that isn't possible, or you simply can't be bothered, then I rest my case.

I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed.

Dad

Also read: The Edifice of Marriage is worth Maintaining.

WikiLeaks publishes STRATFOR intelligence emails

Ellen Branaghin The Independent

Monday, 27 February 2012

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has started to publish more than five million confidential emails from a global intelligence company.

The emails, dated from July 2004 and late December 2011, are said to reveal the "inner workings" of US-based company Stratfor.
The group said the emails show Stratfor's "web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods".
WikiLeaks claims the company "fronts as an intelligence publisher", but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency.
At a press conference in London today, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would not reveal where the emails had come from.
"We are a source protection organisation," he said.
"As a source protection organisation and simply as a media organisation we don't discuss or speculate on sourcing."
The documents are believed to have come from loose-knit hacker group Anonymous, which claimed to have stolen information from the firm in December.
WikiLeaks said the material contains privileged information about the US government's attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor's own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks. The group said there are more than 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange.
But today Mr Assange said more information would emerge in the near future: "We have looked most closely at the actions against us, the bigger story is likely to come out of this probably in three or four days' time."
Mr Assange said: "Today WikiLeaks started releasing over 5 million emails from private intelligence firm Stratfor based in Texas, the United States.
"Together with 25 other media partners from around the world we have been investigating the activities of this company for some months.
"And what we have discovered is a company that is a private intelligence Enron.
"On the surface it presents as if it's a media organisation providing a private subscription intelligence newsletter.
"But underneath it is running paid informants networks, laundering those payments through the Bahamas, and through Switzerland, through private credit cards.
"It is monitoring Bhopal activists for Dow Chemicals, Peta activities for Coca-Cola.
"It is engaged in a seedy business."
Mr Assange said Stratfor was using the secret intelligence it had paid for to invest in a wide range of "geopolitical financial instruments".
"This makes News of the World look like kindergarten," he added.
Mr Assange said the exposure of the emails was part of a long history WikiLeaks has had in exposing the activities of secret organisations.
"The activities of intelligence organisations increasingly are privatised and once privatised they are taken out of the realm of the Freedom of Information Act, of US military law and so they are often used by governments who want to conceal particular activity.
"But Stratfor is simply out of control.
"Even as a private intelligence organisation it is being completely hopeless in protecting the identity of its informants, or even providing accurate information. It is engaged in internal deals with a financial investment firm that it is setting up.
"It really is some type of Enron where there is not even proper corporate control within the organisation."
WikiLeaks said it had worked with 25 media organisations to investigate and information would be released over the coming weeks.
The group said the emails expose a "revolving door" in private intelligence companies in the US, claiming Government and diplomatic sources give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money.
"The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards," the group said.
"Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.
"The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients."
WikiLeaks accused Stratfor of "routine use of secret cash bribes to get information from insiders", and claims an email from chief executive George Friedman in August 2011 suggested his concern over its legality.
In it, he wrote: "We are retaining a law firm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
"I don't plan to do the perp walk and I don't want anyone here doing it either."
The group said: "Like WikiLeaks' diplomatic cables, much of the significance of the emails will be revealed over the coming weeks, as our coalition and the public search through them and discover connections."
It said Stratfor did secret deals with dozens of media organisations and journalists - from Reuters to the Kiev Post.
"While it is acceptable for journalists to swap information or be paid by other media organisations, because Stratfor is a private intelligence organisation that services governments and private clients these relationships are corrupt or corrupting."
The group said it has also obtained Stratfor's list of informants and, in many cases, records of its payoffs.
PA